Concerts in the Metaverse: Depending on who you are, they either look like an even worse version of the pandemic events we’ve been streaming live throughout 2020, or the perfect solution to enjoying music without the irritation of drunken crowds .
For the latter, Universal Music Group (UMG) has just acquired another NFT from the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) collection to face UMG’s metaverse band, Kingship. Get out your 2022 bingo card, because it has it all.
Yes, that’s right: a metaverse group. UMG has been pumping money into Kingship since November. All of the members are NFTs, and while the company didn’t say how much it spent on all of the NFTs, two of the ones it already owned cost around $125,000. in November.
Today, UMG announced that it paid $360,817 in Ethereum to purchase a Bored Ape named Manager Noet All, who will be the leader of the group.
That UMG is creating a band led by cartoon characters with NFTs bought and sold on a publicly distributed, immutable ledger is new for a label that has made a name for itself with decidedly more conventional artists. But this isn’t the first venture into the music scene for BAYC characters in general. Aziz Ansari, The Strokes, Lil Baby and Questlove all performed at “monkey party”, a crypto music festival held in New York in November. Timbaland has a entertainment brand with the collective called “Ape-In Productions”. And Bored Ape #9797 made a music video in December, which made it the first NFT to do so.
But the fact that UMG is actually buying the NFTs, rather than licensing it to a music group, shows the growing power of Bored Apes intellectual property. The Monkeys are cementing their place in the NFT space thanks to high-profile celebrity endorsements, with everyone from Snoop Dogg for Paris Hilton trading their Twitter profile pictures for Ape NFTs. BAYC owner Yuga Labs also used this cultural capital to acquire IP address management for CryptoPunks and Meebits last week.
who knew Gorillaz was so prescient?
Correction: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Aziz Ansari’s name. This correction was made on March 18, 2022.
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